Being a Black woman right out of slavery, there are little to no records of Ada S. McKinley. She has gone unsung among Black sheroes. Here’s what we were able to dig up through research as we continue to honor her legacy.
Ada Sophia McKinley was born on June 26, 1868 in Galveston, Texas during the Reconstruction Era. She and her family soon relocated to Corpus Christi where she stayed until she went off to Prairie View College. She graduated from there and Tillotson Missionary College in San Antonio. After college graduation, she became a school teacher in Austin, up until she met and married dentist William McKinley in 1887.
Sometime in the 1890s, Ada and her husband moved to Chicago after losing their two children to a Diphtheria epidemic that plagued several Texas cities. Rather than wallow in her grief, she immersed herself into Chicago’s political and social circles and began to focus on improving the lives of others.
She joined the Phyllis Wheatley Club, was one of the organizers for the league of women’s voters, and became the president of the Citizens Community Center during the progressive era. She volunteered as a hostess to black soldiers at “War Camp Community Services” which was organized by the Chicago Urban League.
After the Chicago race riot of 1919, Ada marched alongside white settlement house worker Jane Addams to show that interracial solidarity was possible. That same year, she founded a settlement house to assist African American veterans returning from World War I and families migrating from the South when they had nowhere else to go.
The agency reached the 100-year milestone in 2019, and currently serves more than 10,000 people annually at over 70 program locations located mainly in Chicago, with sites in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. Its wide range of services fall under the following categories: Child Development & Youth; Employment & Community Support; and Behavioral Health & Clinical. Services rendered daily include tutoring, mentoring and college placement, foster care, housing opportunities, mental health, youth and family counseling, employment training and placement, and head start programs.
Ada laid the cornerstone at the organization’s first headquarters on 34th Street in Bronzeville in August of 1952 (see group picture accompanying this article from the evening of the dedication). She died just hours later on August 25th. The site is now headquarters for Ada S. McKinley Community Services’ Educational Services programming that has placed more than 75,000 graduating seniors in more than 400 colleges and universities throughout the country, many of whom have become first-generation college graduates.
Her gravesite is prominently next to the gravestone of the first African American Mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, at Oak Woods Cemetery on East 67th Street on Chicago’s South side.
